Perspective

Charles Sellers is a distinguished historian who writes from a Marxist historical perspective. The reader will find the book highly ideological and nearly perfectly in line with the Marxian historiography characteristic of a certain brand of academic historian that is waning in the early 1990s. Classical Marxist historiography conceives of history as driven by economic and technological change. When technology changes the economy changes, as it does with the development of modern machinery and science. These forces in turn produce the industrial revolution. These economic forces move society from a pre-capitalist feudal order that is characterized by explicit forms of domination in terms of clerical rule, serfdom and out and out slavery. The next stage of liberal capitalism introduces the ideal of human equality, fighting against monarchy, feudalism, and eventually slavery.

However, in Sellers's view, liberal capitalism, while enormously productive and superior to feudalism is only one more...